The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.

... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.

The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.